Comment by nine_k
20 hours ago
This is very cool. I wonder how much time did it actually take, and how much did it cost, because Clause Code is very much not free [1] [2]. It's more like hiring a robotic contractor, very fast, but with a serious hourly rate.
[1]: https://fortune.com/2026/04/28/nvidia-executive-cost-of-ai-i...
[2]: https://www.briefs.co/news/uber-torches-entire-2026-ai-budge...
I'm on Claude Max, so it didn't cost me anything more than the subscription I already have. Had to use it for Something. As for time - for the full CHasm and Fe2O3 suite of sw, I started the work 2026-03-29 and have probably spent 60h or so of my time. But then again I have a very tailored CC setup that I have fine-tuned since last summer with more than 70 CC projects helping me get it the way I need it to be since then.
So, it's at most $400 in Claude expenses for a fully custom suite of software in 2 months. Even if your time is 300/h, it's less than $2k in your own time (which, I would expect, you enjoyed spending). That's insanely impressive.
I need Claude Max in any case for my work, so the cost is effectively null. And I do creative stuff in my spare time regardless, and I don't really think about my hourly rate when I play with my kids either ;)
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Did you miss a factor of 10 in that time-cost calculation?
As a hobby, normal rates don’t apply, but just not to be misleading on the equivalent cost.
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Interested to hear about your CC setup if you'd like to share.
@geir_isene: This is insanely cool, thanks for writing about it.
Do you know how much it would have been at API prices?
Can't speak for their usage, but I calculated my token use with Copilot, my employer paid 22$ for >2000$ in tokens. Given estimates margins, Github is paying 98-99% of the costs for us. I imagine Claude max etc is similar. So it's not sustainable at all
No idea. Probably quite expensive. I usually run 4-5 concurrent CC sessions, so hard to pinpoint for just CHasm and Fe2O3
My irccloud.com subscription is about 60€/year.
I've spent two weeks with the cheapest tiers of Claude Pro + pi.dev+GPT-5.5 (+ some deepseek-v4 via openrouter recently) to create my own bespoke version.
I'm at 90% feature parity currently and surpassed on some levels. For ~20€-ish I've soon replaced a 60€/year subscription service.
I haven't spent a single second thinking about how someone else might run it, it doesn't have logins, security or anything - because I'm going to run it 100% behind a Tailscale node with no external access. The release and deployment processes are exactly how I like it, other people might not. I don't need to care, it's mine =)
A few months ago I did the same with Hazel[0]. That took maybe one evening to get an MVP and a week of casual updates to make it pretty. Now I have my own macOS application that does the exact things I needed Hazel for. It's mine forever and I can add or remove features as I feel like it.
[0] https://www.noodlesoft.com/whats-new-in-hazel-6/